The Walt Disney Company has been engaged in a secretive effort to redesign the Disney World experience

This article was taken from the October 2013 issue of Wired
magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before
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Over the past four years, the Walt Disney Company has been
engaged in a secretive effort to redesign the Disney World
experience. It'll go like this: you buy your ticket online and plan
all the details of your visit. Then you'll get a wristband in the
post, which will be a passport to the experience you've curated.
Snug around your wrist, the so-called MagicBand will use radio
frequency to communicate with sensors around the park, all
orchestrated by software that effectively turns Disney World into a
computer interface. You can enter the park by holding your hand up
to a kiosk; you can arrive at shows with 30 seconds to spare,
having already reserved your seats; you can jump on to rides that
you've selected previously without waiting in long queues; you can
buy anything you want with a wave. An It's a Small World character
could call you by name and wish you a happy birthday.

So could Mickey, who could also greet you at a preselected
meeting time. This is all in the service of fun, of course, but it
is also a glimpse of the future: an integrated experience, a smooth
hybrid of real-world and digital interactions.

This represents a new frontier for design. Over the past 30
years, as every facet of our lives, from shopping to schooling, has
migrated on to computer screens, designers have focused on
perfecting user interfaces -- placing a button in just the right
place for a camera trigger or collapsing the entire payment process
into a series of swipes and taps. But in the coming era of
ubiquitous sensors and miniaturised mobile computing, our digital
interactions won't take place simply on screens. As the new Disney
World suggests, they will happen all around us, constantly, as we
go about our day.

Designers will be creating not products or interfaces but
experiences, a million invisible transactions.

Already we're seeing a groundswell of new products that
insinuate themselves seamlessly into users' lives. These include
personal sensors such as Jawbone's Up, the voice- and
gesture-controlled Xbox One, hyper-intelligent apps such as
Highlight that alert you to interesting people in your immediate
vicinity, and Automatic, a device that communicates with your
smartphone to tell you when you are driving inefficiently. But this
is just the beginning. Within the next five years we will be
surrounded by embedded devices and services. Just as the rise of
the screen challenged designers to create software interfaces, the
rise of screenless digital interactions will challenge them anew.
After all, it's one thing to invent a unique kind of digital
experience in Disney World, a controlled space where people expect
magic. It's altogether trickier to do the same thing in people's
houses, offices and bedrooms -- the most intimate areas of their
lives -- in a way that feels both natural and inevitable.

Bill Buxton bears a striking resemblance to Doc Brown from Back
to the Future -- more strapping than you'd expect for a mad
scientist, his bald head rimmed with a snowy hedge of hair.

In conversation, he can be piercingly intense. And, just like
Doc Brown, in 1985 he unleashed a breakthrough. Buxton, a lifelong
musician who has also worked for Xerox PARC and Silicon Graphics,
created one of the world's first multitouch interfaces when he
turned an electronic drumhead into a tactile synthesiser control.
That drum was a progenitor of every touchscreen in use today.

Matt Webb, CEO of London design firm Berg, is inventing a system that will allow multiple users to share smart connected devices

Andrew B Myers

In the mid-aughts, Buxton wrote an article that helped define a
new discipline called experience design -- a focus not on products
or devices themselves, but on the impact they have on people's
lives. As an example, he wrote about two orange-juice presses -- an
electric model and a manual lever press called the OrangeX.

The electric juicer had flimsy plastic buttons, and the motor
screeched to life with an annoying whir. The OrangeX required a bit
more effort but also sported an inverted rocker crank that
gradually transmitted more force as you pressed down. Buxton's
point was that the OrangeX created a feeling of tangible mastery
that helped him enjoy the juice more. Designers didn't shape just
gadgets but behaviours and visceral responses around those
devices.

Today, Buxton, principal researcher at Microsoft Research, says
the next challenge for experience design is to create a
constellation of devices, including wearable gadgets, tablets,
phones and smart appliances, that can co-ordinate with one another
and adapt to users' changing needs. This focus on the totality of
our devices stands in contrast to where we find ourselves today:
constantly adding new gadgets and functions without much thought as
to how they fit together. (For instance, anyone lugging around a
laptop, iPad and iPhone is also carrying the equivalent of three
video cameras, three email devices, three media players and
probably three different photo albums.) Even as our devices have
become simpler individually, the cumulative complexity of all of
them is increasing.

Buxton has said that the solution is to "stop focusing on the
individual objects as islands". He has come up with a simple
standard for whether a gadget should even exist: each new device
should reduce the complexity of the system and increase the value
of everything else in the ecosystem.

To see what he means by increasing the value of the ecosystem,
consider the phone syncing built into many cars. After you link
your phone, the vehicle boots up its own voice-recognition
technology so you can make hands-free calls. When you leave the
car, you simply grab your phone and it blinks to life again. The
car and phone engage in a quiet dialogue geared towards providing
only the capabilities you actually need.

If all our devices interacted so co-operatively, whole new
possibilities would begin to emerge. For example, Frog, the company
best known for the Apple IIc's industrial design of the early 80s,
has been building a prototype light-bulb that will sense where
people are in a room and project touchscreens on to walls or
tables. Now imagine if a device like that could communicate with
your mobile gadgets -- if the light bulb, sensing your presence in
the kitchen and knowing the apps on your phone, projected your
cooking apps on to the refrigerator when you began preparing
dinner.

To deal with such complexity, our devices will have to become
smarter. Dave Morin, CEO of mobile social-networking company Path
(wired 05.13), has a maxim to explain how to think about the coming
age of experience design: "AI is the new UI". That is, the effort
and attention that designers once poured into interfaces should be
extended to code that doesn't just react to the push of a button,
but anticipates your actions. For instance, Path will automatically
update your location when it senses that you've settled somewhere
new. But that's really just a proof of concept. Morin's maxim hints
at the silent conversations that our phones and wearable devices
will have with the world around us -- and each other. For example,
Apple's new mobile operating system, which uses Bluetooth Smart to
share data with devices in your vicinity, could power a number of
these kinds of intelligent background features.

Innovations like these present great challenges for designers.
Today's app and software designers already have an understanding of
how customers interact with products. They know down to the pixel
where to place a button, how fast a screen should scroll and how to
make an app simple but not simplistic. But as designers move off
screens and into the larger world, they'll need to consider every
nuance of our everyday activity and understand human behaviour
every bit as well as novelists or filmmakers. (Otherwise they may
engender the same kind of backlash as Google Glass, a potentially
cool product that unleashed a torrent of privacy concerns.)

That will require a shift in how tech designers view the world.
Matt Webb, CEO of Berg, a London design firm that has created
forward-looking prototypes for clients such as the BBC, Google and
Nokia, says it will demand thinking way beyond today's standard
scenario of a person working on a computer. For example, he says,
"Our technology can't understand what it means to be in a room of
two to six people. I find it totally nuts that when you sign in to
something, no one else can use it. Imagine having to sign in to a
light bulb before turning it on!"

Berg is trying to solve that problem by inventing a system that
will allow multiple users to share smart, connected devices which
will be able to adjust to their individual tastes and preferences.
"That's the world we actually live in," says Jack Schulze, Berg's
cofounder. "But it really is a massive challenge for software."

Just consider how these challenges apply to Netflix, for
example: if your spouse watches something on your account, it
probably renders the company's super-sophisticated recommendation
engine worthless. Netflix is trying to address this problem by
creating a feature allowing multiple user profiles on one account.
"But even that is the wrong solution," Webb says. "When we watch
television together, that group isn't just multiple people added
together. That group is something more." It's easy to imagine a
smarter, future version of Netflix -- one that uses, say, an Xbox
Kinect camera to recognise who's in the room and can determine
everyone's overlapping interests.

The true potential of experience design comes as that kind of
sophistication is applied to all our interactions. "We have all
these incredible benefits to our online life," says Jake Barton,
founder of Local Projects, a media design firm, "and they're
suddenly being applied to physical space." Take the example of
Warby Parker, the US online eyewear retailer that has begun opening
retail shops.

Imagine if the shop automatically brought up your online profile
-- allowing you to focus only on the glasses that the company's
computers know you already like. Or look at Nespresso, whose
physical stores offer its customers an RFID card that allows
automatic billing and personalised service based on purchase
history. Barton believes the next step will be to create a
universal, portable electronic identity that allows all of our
experiences to be that customised. Companies such as
digital-payment pioneer Square are already working to build just
that.

In the wrong hands, this is a dystopian prospect -- technology's
unwanted intrusion into our every waking moment. But without the
proper design, without considering how new products and services
fit into people's day-to-day lives, any new technology can be
terrifying. That's where the challenge comes in. The task of making
this new world can't be left up to engineers and technologists
alone - otherwise we will find ourselves overrun with amazing
capabilities that people refuse to take advantage of.

Designers, who have always been adept at watching and responding
to our needs, must bring to bear a better understanding of how
people actually live. It's up to them to make this new world feel
like something we've always wanted and a natural extension of
what we already have.